The Pleasures and Uses of Televisual Historical Caricature Introduction

Distorted Recognition: The pleasures and uses of televisual historical caricature Introduction A straitjacketed figure is wheeled on a vertical trolley through a dank corridor lit by flickering fluorescent tubes. A low-angled medium close-up reveals the bottom half of a royal blue skirt, and sensible black high-heeled pumps. After the trolley comes to rest, the porter moving it lifts from the figure a full-face mask, reminiscent of the one worn by Anthony Hopkins in The Silence of the Lambs (Jonathan Demme, 1991). The face revealed is not Hannibal Lecter’s. It is a woman’s. She has a red-lipsticked, downturned mouth, over which a sinister, cool smile plays. Her eyes wear pale blue pastel shadow. Her ears are bejewelled with tasteful pearls. The strawberry blonde hair atop is teased into a tall perm. When she finally speaks, it is in a low, slow voice with a lilting, arhythmical cadence that allows her to emphasise firmly her increasingly strange and fervent anti-socialist arguments. Any viewer familiar with her image and voice can see that this is supposed to be Margaret Thatcher. And yet, this is not an accurate impression. The hair is larger, the make-up less subtle than Thatcher’s. The voice’s soft authority is drawn out into a barely comprehensible drawl. The political sentiments voiced in the dialogue constitute a reductio ad absurdum of Thatcher’s well-known social views. This isn’t an impersonation of Thatcher. It is a caricature. This scene appears in Psychobitches (Sky Arts, 2012 – 2014), a British sketch comedy programme whose central conceit is that famous historical or mythical women are offered diagnosis and treatment by a contemporary psychiatrist (Rebecca Front). The structure of sketch comedy demands that characters, whether recurring or one-off, should be instantly recognisable, their characteristics made transparent through costuming, make-up and performance. Think, for example of Vicky Pollard (Matt Lucas) in Little Britain (BBC Three/BBC One 2003 – 2007), who is easily identifiable for her pink tracksuit, high ponytail and permanent scowl. When these characters are portrayals of real people, they become caricatures. Notable examples of such televisual caricature include Spitting Image (Central Television, 1984 – 1996) and Dead Ringers (BBC Two, 2002 – 2007). In these cases, caricature is used to satirical ends, to critique agents of contemporary politics or popular culture. This is in keeping with Judith Wechsler’s argument that ‘no artistic effort is as clearly linked to its time as caricature, and no aspect of caricature is as ephemeral as its humor.’i However, this article takes as its focus series, like Psychobitches, which engage in caricature of historical figures. Along with Psychobitches, I will explore the forms, functions and pleasures of historical caricature in Horrible Histories (CBBC 2009 -), the television adaptation of the popular non-fiction children’s books, and Drunk History (Comedy Central UK, 2015 -), a British version of a US format in which comedians and media figures tell stories from history in an intoxicated state, their words lip-synced by costumed actors playing out the scenes they describe. Caricature is usually understood as a comedic depiction of a real person that is deliberately distorted to convey through outward appearance a critique of the subject’s personality. In portrait caricature, such distortions result in vulgar and abject imagery, but these are distinguished from other grotesques, as Gillian Rhodes notes, by individuation: the perceiver is meant to be able to recognise who is depicted. This, alongside purposeful exaggeration, is what distinguishes caricature from similar cultural forms.ii Art historian E.H. Gombrich noted that the earliest iteration of portrait caricature coincided with the growth of the pseudoscience of physiognomy, the belief that human character can be determined from analysis of a person’s physical appearance, particularly their facial features. This contributed to the sense that the antimimetic practice of the deliberately distorted portrait could nevertheless have a privileged relationship with ‘truth’. As Gombrich and Ernst Kris summarise, ‘caricature, showing more of the essential, is truer than reality itself’. iii At its beginning, then, one of the central contradictions of caricature emerges: how is it that a clearly distorted portrait can not only be easily recognisable, but indeed more effective than a mimetic representation? Cognitive psychologist Rhodes coined the term ‘superportrait’ to account for the paradoxical power of the caricatured image that is superior to the veridical portrait in terms of subject recognition.iv Adam Gopnik suggests that the fact that we can recognise not only the subject of the image but also that it is deliberately exaggerated implies that the human mind has ‘knowledge about its own perceptual functioning.’ For Gopnik, this is crucial to the comedy of the caricature: That’s why we find caricatures funny: we recognise that an artist has somehow tapped into the tendency of the mind to exaggerate, generalize and simplify, and has made these tendencies explicit.v The comedic value of the caricature is thus dependent on the mental energy of the perceiver. Similarly, Gombrich argued that the ‘beholder’s share’, the active contemplation of the viewer, is especially relevant for the caricature. vi It is crucial that the perceiver possesses a certain basic knowledge to be able to decode the distorted image and understand its critique of its subject. This need for active perception, and the requirement of pre-existing cultural knowledge for it to function, renders the caricature a more sophisticated cultural form than at first glance. In this article, I will be considering some of the ways in which historical television comedies draw upon precisely caricature’s ability to engage a viewer’s knowledge and agency as part of their effectiveness in constructing popular alternatives to authoritative, narrative history. Caricature, as I will argue throughout, is in a unique position to do this as hinges on two central and paradoxical pleasures: that of distortion and of recognition. I will first consider some of the ways in which televisual form is used in order to distort the images of the historical figures portrayed: specifically through the use of framing and editing, performance conventions, costuming and make-up and intertextual referencing. This will be compared with the ways in which certain kinds of knowledge are invoked, an exploration that will be continued in the second section. Here, the ‘recognition’ required of the caricature is examined in relation to the representation of history on television and in postmodern contexts. This article will make the case that caricature should be more carefully considered as a form of televisual historical representation, and added to the pantheon of theorised techniques for the critical historiographical reading typical of postmodern approaches to history. Distortion: Televisual caricature and its cousins Deliberate caricature is an only occasional but strikingly visible part of British television culture. It can function televisually in relatively simple ways, drawing purely on the pleasurable recognition of famous faces somewhat distorted. For instance, in the surreal gameshow Bigheads (ITV 2017 -), contestants compete wearing large three-dimensional portrait caricatures over their heads and are referred to by the presenters and voiceover commentary only by the name of the celebrity depicted. Similar absurd imagery has a notable place in surreal British television comedy, such as in Monty Python’s Flying Circus (BBC, 1969 – 1974), the work of Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer, or The Mighty Boosh (BBC Three, 2004 – 2007). Here, bizarre costuming, make-up and hair combines with a heightened, silly performance style to produce representations that are exaggerations, if not always individuations. As previously indicated, the structure and style of caricature makes it an apt mode for representing real people within sketch comedies, where it will most often appear within parodies, as in the witty spoofs of popular movies in French and Saunders (BBC, 1987 – 2007) where the comedians are transformed into hyperbolic versions of, for example, Bette Davies and Joan Crawford. More usually, caricature is employed in the service of contemporary political satire, whether in extended comic representations of famous people, as in soap opera parody The Windsors (Channel 4, 2016 - ) or in the sketch show format, as in Newzoids (ITV, 2015 - ). However, it would be inaccurate to suggest that the satirical work of caricature has been limited to comment on current affairs and contemporary politics, as there exists a parallel tradition of caricaturing historical figures as part of period sitcoms such as Blackadder (BBC, 1983 – 1989) or Let Them Eat Cake (BBC, 1998). As will be explored in the second part of this essay, such historical comedies have been read as invitations to look askance at historical figures and to question received historical knowledge, specifically drawing on comedy’s distancing effects to allow for a critical epistemological approach. The distorted recognition function of caricature supports this thesis, since it is predicated on subverting the pre-existing knowledge the perceiver has of the represented figure. This brief outline of some of the ways in which television light entertainment and comedy have utilised caricature (or similar representational forms) is intended

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